Thoughts, Sounds, Space
by HaloOfStars
Summary: A new transfer student shows up, and Kusuo's world is flipped on its axis. He never imagined he'd bother to go to other worlds. Kusuo battles with loss, aliens, and his own powers as he struggles to survive on his own.


**A/N: Hey guys, so this is like, my second fic ever. I absolutely love the Saiki K. shows, but I have always wondered what would happen if it were given a more serious tone, instead of being a comedy. **

****Please be advised that this takes place after Saiki ended the time loop, but before Kusuke offered him the chance to get rid of his powers for good. Saiki is 18 years old in this fic.**

**And before you all yell at me, I know Saiki's powers are supposed to be uncontrollable without his limiters, but for the sake of writing, please bear with me :')**

**Disclaimer: I do not own the manga, or the two shows. They belong to Shūichi Asō.**

And the day was going so well, too.

Once again, a new transfer student joined Kusuo's class. This one seemed normal at a glance (finally), so the psychic wrote him off as normal. What a mistake that turned out to be.

The transfer student, Toyoaki Matsu, was an unassuming, bland-looking boy of average height, weight, and with plain brown hair and more unusual silver eyes. Even his thoughts were boring.

When the new student walked into the room, Kusuo spared him all of ten seconds before casting him aside in his mind. No reason to pay attention to someone who was just an extra.

_I need to pick up groceries for Mom. _Kusuo thought. He made a mental list of things to get from the store as soon as classes were over for the day.

Nendo leaned over him, and Kusuo repressed the urge to just teleport home.

"Hey Best Buddy! You're walking home with us, right? Wanna get ramen?" Nendo's loud voice bombarded Kusuo's senses.

Internally, he cringed. '_Good grief.' _He stood up abruptly, with the intention of going to the washroom to escape Nendo, when he felt a pair of eyes bore into his skull. It was such an intense gaze that it sent a chill up his spine. Kusuo spun around quickly, searching the room. He met Toyoaki's stare. The new student. The one he had dismissed within ten seconds.

'_What is this feeling?' _Kusuo thought. He felt like the prey shivering under the gaze of a predator. He felt small, weak, tiny, in comparison to this gaze. And that was saying something, too, considering his own status as an all-powerful psychic. He realized that the staring contest had not broken once, neither of them had blinked in… Two minutes? Around that. Kusuo actually took a step back, a bead of sweat rolling down his temple. His back collided with his desk, jolting him out of the near-trance he had been in.

And then Toyoaki smiled. Not a kind smile, not a polite smile. _'No… This is the smile of someone who knows. Too much.' _Too many teeth, lips stretched too wide, eyes vacant and malicious. Kusuo almost teleported halfway across the planet when that smile hit him. Key word: Almost. He felt his body flicker in place, only the briefest of moments actually across the world. But his body stayed firmly in the suddenly empty classroom. He instantly knew it wasn't his own failure to blame for the lack of escape; some unseen force had gripped his very _soul_ and held him in place. He could hardly move this time, even with the _liberal _application of super-strength (and he knew how strong he was).

'_Maybe if I took off my limiter—' _His thought was drowned out by a low, deep chuckle.

"Oh… Saiki, Saiki, Saiki." Kusuo visibly flinched with every word. "That won't help you at all."

"Wh-who are you?" For once, Kusuo spoke out loud, his voice rough from both disuse and the painful pressure surrounding his body.

"Oh, little old me? Well… I suppose you could say we're family, in a manner of speaking. You're the salt to my pepper, as it were."

"F-family?" Kusuo could not stop the stutter that entered his voice. The pressure increased a little bit more, and he grunted. He tried to aim a blast of pyrokinesis at Toyoaki, but nothing but heat came out.

"Nice try, Saiki, but I have you in my version of a psychic hold. Nothing you try will work, and yes, I mean nothing. You see, I know everything about you, every little quirk, every will and whim of yours has filtered into my brain for years. You see, we're connected. In the way you can't turn off your telepathy, I can't turn off this accursed link to you. I hear every beat of your little heart, every signal your brain fires, even the tiniest twitch of your jaw I can _hear. _For years, YEARS, my own existence has been drowned out by you, my mind flooded with sound. And don't even get me started on your powers. Each use of them is like a cheese grater to my cheese brain—"

'_What's with these weird metaphors?'_

"Don't… DON'T SPEAK, Don't THINK. I can hear it all! It's just another thing for the pile of tangled SHIT I have to endure daily. It's never, never quiet! Even when I sleep I hear you… Feel you…" At this point Toyoaki gripped the sides of his skull, a near deranged grin plastered onto his face. "WHICH IS WHY, I'm here to put an end to it! I'm psychic too, you see?" He giggled. "Believe it or not, I'm actually stronger than you!"

Kusuo's slightly disturbed expression became worsened as he heard this; the blood drained from his face. He tried futilely to read Toyoaki's thoughts, but all that came back was a jumbled, horrifying sound that scraped his mind and shredded his train of thought. Kusuo quickly tried to block it out, only succeeding enough to hear the tail end of Toyoaki's monologue.

"—which is why! I decided not to kill you myself, but watch you suffer and die horribly! I rewound the Earth's time to when that old volcano was supposed to erupt, but you stopped it! But this time, no-one will be there to help this planet as it DIES! We'll both be devoured by the destruction! It's a win-win! You'll die, and I'll be at PEACE!"

Kusuo gaped. The volcano? _'Shit, shit! I have to get there- have to save them—'_

The ground shook horribly.

"Oh, and did I mention that my rewind took us to the moment before the eruption?"

The windows cracked, and the plaster on the walls broke apart. The ground split under Kusuo's feet, and he fell. Faster and faster. He tried in vain to fly up, but whatever Toyoaki had done had shorted his abilities. The wind from below raked though his hair and clothes and made his eyes tear up. It got hotter and hotter as he fell, and as a last-ditch effort he pulled both limiters out of his skull, not paying any mind to the fact the second one would "reveal his powers".

The sudden overwhelming sensation of TOO MUCH! He blacked out for a moment, and his nose began to bleed. The heat as he fell was nearly unbearable, but whatever Toyoaki had done seemed to be wearing off. Either that or the spike in his output overwhelmed the pressure, because he managed to slow his descent until he was drifting downwards at a manageable pace.

He looked up though his now broken glasses at what lay above him, his un-limited x-ray vision cutting through miles of stone in an instant. He was shocked silent.

Deep purple eyes scanned the planet, tracing huge gashes in the Earth's crust. The cracks criss-crossed every inch of the world, and hot magma spewed out of them. He tried to look for any signs of life, any sign of human civilisation left.

The destruction must have been instant. A chain reaction, probably. Kusuo didn't care to look into the science of it.

'_It's… all gone…' _Everything he once knew, everything he… loved. Taken away in an instant.

He was floating in midair now, right above the planet's core. Unbidden tears spilled from his usually dry eyes as he dry-heaved in horror, eyes fixated on the corpse of his mother.

With his powers back, he was near-invulnerable to the searing heat from the core, but he could feel that it was unstable. It bulged and flared unevenly, ravaging chunks of rock and ore, casting them aside and into space. The water from the oceans began to evaporate, all as Kusuo watched.

He scrubbed his eyes with his sleeve, which was burnt and torn. He brought his mind back to a facsimile of composure, burying the sadness and hate, and terror at being alone. He flew upwards, out of the deep gouge his school fell into.

Subconsciously, he erected a psychic barrier to protect his body from the harsh vacuum of space, and with a listless expression, he watched his planet cave in on itself.

Within a matter of minutes, a thriving civilisation on a lush green planet was wiped out, and it's only survivor floated in space, alone.

Kusuo shivered, drawing his uniform's jacket around himself. He'd expanded his telepathy to its absolute, untethered limit, and found not even the beginnings of a conscious thought to direct himself towards. And so, he'd picked a random direction, and launched himself toward it.

Space was cold and unforgiving, even to someone like him, and his barrier only preserved oxygen, not temperature. He was reluctant to use pyrokinesis, as he wasn't sure how his body would handle using more than two powers at once. With his limiters both on, he could barely handle using two. However, as he had only really trained under his constrained state, he had no real idea of the upper bounds of his abilities now. He didn't want to accidentally overwhelm his mind by trying too much at once and be stranded in space, unconscious.

Having already had once traumatic experience today (though compartmentalized it was), he was tired. Tired of holding in his emotions, tired of using two powers at once, tired of life.

'_At least I don't have to deal with Nendo anymore.' _He thought bitterly, and swiped away a fresh wave of tears angrily. _'What the hell was that guy's problem anyway? I was having a normal day, then he just shows up and everyone I know is dead within twenty minutes.'_

Kusuo idly dodged around a cluster of space-rocks, speeding up in his flight slightly. He was worried. He didn't know if Toyoaki had survived the destruction, but it was likely since the transfer student was like Kusuo. He seriously hoped that putting distance between himself and the destruction would take his thoughts and movements out to Toyoaki's range (if there even was one).

He was also worried about what he was going to do now. He had nowhere to go, and the atmosphere in his barrier was getting smaller by the hour. He couldn't rest either, because if he fell asleep, the barrier would drop and he would suffocate. _'Even psychics need to breathe.'_

The pink-haired boy grit his teeth and ran his hand through his hair (which felt strange without the limiters in the way). He must have lost his glasses at some point, because the area around him wasn't bathed in a sea of green. _'Damn, I lost my unique look.'_

He supposed that there was no point in preventing himself from making these humorous comments. If he was developing a coping mechanism, so be it. He wasn't worried about his glasses, though. If there was nobody left, there was nobody to turn to stone.

He chuckled wryly to himself. _'Unless aliens happen to exist, which I doubt. I would've heard some kind of thought by now. I'm pretty sure that I've left the Milky Way at this point, though I don't know what my top speed is. I wonder why I haven't lost control of my powers… I thought Kusuke said that the removal of one limiter would destroy the world and the other would reveal my powers to the world…'_

His introspection was cut off by a bright, nearly blinding light that had him squinting, and he slowed down just enough to barely see some object following him.

'_What?! How is it keeping up with me?' _Looking closer, Kusuo could see it was some sort of ship, and wondered why he couldn't hear anyone's thoughts, even in a different language.

Experimentally, he sped back up, and the ship stayed firmly on his trail, even making some headway toward him. He spun around so he was flying backward, and made a stop so sudden that it made a silent shockwave. The ship matched his movement, the only difference being once it stopped, its inertia caused to slide forward.

A strange sensation washed over him, an almost prodding feeling, like he was being scanned. It felt kind of gross, honestly. Maybe he should board the ship? His barrier was shrinking, just barely big enough to cover him now.

The psychic boy activated his clairvoyance, momentarily dropping the barrier so he could cross his eyes to look for an ideal landing spot. Within a fraction of a second, he re-erected the barrier (It seemed to generate its own atmosphere, though a small one, weird) and took a gulp of air. He only managed to get a brief glimpse of a carpeted floor.

'_Whatever, it'll do. I hope there's breathable air in there.' _Saiki gathered his strength and psychic energy, allowing it to fill his body with the familiar, displaced sensation that came with teleportation. He felt his atoms shift and reassemble themselves, and finally, there was solid ground under his feet.

He sighed imperceptibly and looked up at his surroundings, only to freeze when the sound of many weapons charging hit him.

'_Good grief.'_


End file.
